Thanks for the references to the HTML spec. (I had searched for
All occurrences of the word "break", and didn't find anything
obviously applicable.) But to drill down on of your citations:
>From: Dave J Woolley [mailto:david.woolley@bts.co.uk]
>
>http://www.w3.org/TR/html40/struct/text.html#h-9.3.5
>about 4 paragraphs from the end.
>By convention, visual HTML user agents wrap text lines to fit within
the
>available margins. Wrapping algorithms depend on the script being
formatted.
>In Western scripts, for example, text should only be wrapped at white
space.
[JD:] Note that section 9.3.5 begins with the disclaimer:
"Note. The following section is an informative description of the
behavior
of some current visual user agents when formatting paragraphs...."
I think it's somewhat strong to characterize as "broken" a user agent
Which conflicts with text which is merely "informative" and not
"normative".
(Taken by itself, I don't read section section 9.3.3 on soft hyphen as
implying that the line-breaking behavior under discussion is broken.)
That said, I understand the frustration at the variation in behavior!
Jerry Dunietz
jerryd@microsoft.com